1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of automotive applications. In particular, the invention relates to a position detection and transmission device for a vehicle and a method for detecting and transmitting a position of a vehicle, a vehicle comprising the position detection and transmission device, a program element, and a computer-readable medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Position detection devices can be used to track the motion profile of vehicles. In land vehicles, such position detection devices may in particular be used to determine the route and/or the distance driven in a particular geographic region. The position data acquired by the position detection device may be used for automatically determining an amount of taxes to be paid by the vehicle owner, for example.
An example of such an automatic system for determining the amount of taxes to be paid is the International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA), that implements automatic data recording. The data recording and transmission is carried out by a recording device installed in a participating vehicle and used to track the position and the motion of the vehicle. The recording device records tracking data at a certain sampling rate. Each sample contains the vehicle odometer value, latitude of the vehicle's position, and longitude of the vehicle's position when the sampling occurs. Such a sample may further include a timestamp value along with the odometer value, latitude value, and longitude value.
The vehicle odometer value is stored in the binary format and using 3 bytes, i.e., 3*8 bit=24 bit with one bit representing a predetermined distance value, for example 1 km or 1 mile (=1.609 km). The vehicle odometer value may be stored as an unsigned binary integer value.
Each of the latitude and the longitude is stored in the binary format and using 4 bytes (32 bits) with one bit representing 10E-7 degree, for example. These values may be stored as a signed integer value in two's complements format.
The timestamp value may be stored in the binary format using 4 bytes in the unix time representation with a resolution of one second.
The vehicle odometer value, latitude, and longitude are being transmitted cyclically to a receiving station which collects the tracking data from all recording devices and which stores these data in a database in order to create reports for determining the taxes.
For transmitting the tracking data from the recording device to the receiving station, a data transmission link or communication channel between these elements is required. Usually, the communication channel is a GPRS/UMTS/LTE wireless connection and the data is transmitted on a periodically basis.
For transmitting one sample of the tracking data (odometer value, longitude, latitude), at least 11 bytes may be required in the abovementioned example (3 bytes odometer value, 4 bytes latitude, 4 bytes longitude).